Important Takeaways:

• Victor Davis Hanson points out Western culture shouldn’t be so nonchalant about nuclear threats from autocratic nuclear nations. The Idea of “It can’t happen here” can prove fatal
• After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.”
• No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks.
• But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement — and why now?
• [In particular China, and Russia] both believe that the only impediment to their victories would be an intervention from the U.S. and the NATO alliance, a conflict that could descend into mutual threats to resort to nuclear weapons.
• Thus, the recent warnings of Xi and Putin.
• Almost monthly, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un continues his weary threats to use his nuclear arsenal to destroy South Korea or Japan.
• A similarly monotonous, pro-Hamas Turkish President Recep Erdogan…
• Iran’s theocrats simultaneously claim they are about ready to produce nuclear weapons. And, of course, since 1979, Iran has periodically promised to wipe Israel off the map and half the world’s Jews with it.
• Oddly, the global reaction to the promise of Armageddon remains one of nonchalance. Most feel that such strongmen rant wildly but would never unleash weapons of civilizational destruction
• Only Israel has an effective anti-ballistic missile dome. And the more the conventional power of the West declines, the more in extremis it will have to rely on a nuclear deterrent — at a time when it has no effective missile defense of its homelands.
• In a just-released book, “The End of Everything,” I wrote about four examples of annihilation — the classical city-state of Thebes, ancient Carthage, Byzantine Constantinople and Aztec Tenochtitlan — in which the unimaginable became all too real.
• In all these erasures, the targeted, naïve states believed that their illustrious pasts, rather than a realistic appraisal of their present inadequate defenses, would ensure their survival.
• If the past is any guide to the present, we should take heed that what almost never happens in war can certainly still occur.
• When killers issue wild, even lunatic, threats, we should nonetheless take them seriously.
• We should not count on friends or neutrals to save our civilization. Instead, Americans should build defense systems over the skies of our homeland, secure our borders, ensure our military operates on meritocracy, cease wild deficit spending and borrowing, and rebuild both our conventional and nuclear forces.
• Otherwise, we will naïvely — and fatally — believe that we are magically exempt when the inconceivable becomes all too real.

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